It is becoming increasingly more apparent in Lincoln Douglas debate that students of color are being held to a higher threshold of proving why racism is bad, than white students are in being forced to justify their actions and in round discourse. The abstractness of philosophical texts being used in LD and the willingness of judges and coaches alike to endorse that abstractness has fostered a climate in which students are allowed to be divorced from the discourse they are producing. Debate should first and foremost be viewed as a performance. Every action taken, every word said, and every speech given reflects a performance of the body.Yet in an age where debate is about how many arguments a student can get on the flow, white students’ performances are consistently allowed to be detached from their bodies, performance by the body, while students of color must always embody their discourse.As a result universal theories are allowed to be viewed as detached from any meaning outside of being just an argument. My argument is three-fold. First, debaters have adopted a “universal principle,” which has allowed them to be detached from the practical implications of what they said. Second, is that we must re-conceptualize the role of speech and the speech act to account for the in round performances of the body. The final part is that judges must begin to view their roles as educators and must be accountable for the discourse they endorse with their ballot